The Criterion Collection
Mar 30, 2016 — More than forty years after legendary documentarian Les Blank began filming singer-songwriter Leon Russell, the brilliant work that emerged from his observations, A Poem Is a Naked Person, is finally available on Blu-ray and DVD. This long-awaited vérité wonder melds...
Short Takes
Mar 29, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the release on Blu-ray and DVD of Les Blank’s legendary Leon Russell music documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person. And while we’re on the topic of fascinating nonfiction filmmaking, we’re also taking a look at a...
Mar 29, 2016 — Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.
Short Takes
Mar 15, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating horror maestro David Cronenberg’s seventy-third birthday with a look back at his brilliantly twisted oeuvre.
In Theaters
Mar 10, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis weekend, the Gold Town Nickelodeon in Juneau, Alaska, will be showing one of Ingmar Bergman’s most fascinating films, The Magic Flute. In the film, which is an exquisite reimagining of Mozart’s 1791 opera of the same title, Bergman...
Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.
Short Takes
Jan 27, 2016 — Last month, we were thrilled to release the late filmmaker Howard Brookner’s long-awaited documentary, Burroughs: The Movie. Shot over five years, from the late 1970s to the early ’80s, the critically praised film offers an intimate glimpse into the life...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...
In Theaters
Jan 8, 2016 — In March of 1967, Bosley Crowther, then the film critic for the New York Times, wrote about Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, penning what is now considered one of his most famously wrong-headed reviews.